Читать книгу Crow Stone - Jenni Mills - Страница 16

Chapter Nine

The sky is a receding blue circle. It’s bitterly cold. My breath hangs as mist in the shaft while I go down the ladder, slippery with frost.

Gary Bennett’s just above me. Looking up in the dim light, I can see his heavy steel-toecap boots on the rungs. As Martin would say, send the woman down first so you’ve got a nice soft landing. In fact, this couldn’t be more different from unofficial visits to flint mines; there’s a platform half-way down, to catch us if we slip. Nowadays this is probably the most regulated, safety-conscious industry in Britain. A bit late, really, for all those earlier miners who died of black lung or in coal-gas explosions.

Above Gary is the archaeologist, the one with the red runny nose and stringy hair, whose eyes keep swivelling to my breasts. I can hear him sneezing. His name’s Dickon, very emphatic on the last syllable. I wish he’d learn to wipe his nose. I’m sure any second it’s going to drip on me. Not, perhaps, a good idea to look up, after all, even though I’m curious to see more of Gary from this angle.

God, I had a hangover on Saturday morning. I woke in a panic about five a. m., certain I was going to find Gary’s head on the pillow next to mine. Luckily, no. I seemed to have made it to bed on my own.

Do I mean luckily?

I’m only joking. I do remember most of Friday night. I behaved with commendable control, given that the first Laphroaig was followed by several more. Nick would have been proud of me. If you’re going to drink, he’d say, learn to hold it, like I do. Then he’d fall over.

I don’t think I said anything too embarrassing. I remember talking very intensely about mining, and about how going underground is always about daring yourself, but making sure you have the best possible odds of coming out again alive. And Gary nodding, and looking at me with those weathered blue eyes, and lighting another of his tasteless cigarettes for me. He’s a good listener, I’ll give him that.

My foot touches mud: the bottom of the shaft. It’s already warmer, though distinctly damp: the temperature in the stone mines is a constant fifteen degrees or so, summer and winter. Gary jumps down the last couple of rungs to land beside me, and heads for the switchboard on the wall. The daylight doesn’t illuminate much, so I can hear rather than see Dickon reaching the end of the ladder …

And feel it. Bloody hell. That was deliberate, I’m sure. The bastard meant to brush an arm across my breast.

I’m vibrating with anger and ready to confront him, when Gary flicks the switches and everything suddenly goes bright.

God, it’s beautiful.

The light shows us huge spaces like the undercroft of a cathedral, a rocky ceiling supported by pillars that taper towards the bottom. The stone is every shade of creamy yellow you can imagine. It’s like butter, like honey, like toffee. When you get it above ground, limestone weathers and turns greyish. But down here it’s juicy, running with sap, soft, delicious and golden.

‘You been into an underground quarry before, Kit?’ says Gary.

‘I’ve never worked in limestone. Most of the stabilization I’ve done has been in Cornwall–old copper and tin mines.’

The stone’s soft because it’s full of water. In the ground, limestone soaks up moisture: quarry sap, it’s called. Above ground the sap will evaporate, and the rock will harden and cure. But before that it is easily worked, sliced out of the earth like cheese. It’s a freestone, and the men who shaped it into blocks were called freemasons. You can cut it in any direction, saw it like timber, carve it as easily as wood. It carves more easily, because there’s no grain to consider.

The stones that built Bath’s Pump Room might have been lifted from right where I’m standing. It’s a pity they can’t run coach tours through here: the American and Japanese tourists would love it, camera flashes bouncing off the ceiling like underground lightning.

The archaeologist blows his nose and it feels like somebody farted in church.

Gary sees my expression, and smiles. He has a lovely smile. It’s like the rock: sunny and solid and reassuring. For a moment I could almost forget that this glorious cathedral has to be filled with concrete.

I look around again, this time using my professional eye. Jesus Christ. I’ve been in some wobbly places, but this beats the lot.

The big caverns like this one are called voids. Artificial metal and wood tunnels run through them. They look like long cages with great spidery steel or timber struts for walls, and solid reinforced roofs. We have to stay inside them because it’s too dangerous to walk outside. For the past year, since the construction phase of the project began, teams of miners have been building these roadways to take us metre by metre through the quarries, and they’re nowhere near finished yet. After concrete has been pumped into the voids and the job is finished, far in the future, the steel roads will still be here, wormholes through the fill, so bats can fly in and out.

‘You ready for this, Kit?’ says Gary. He strikes me as a bit overprotective, but that’s not uncommon among the men I’ve worked with. He pats the self-rescuer on his belt, and for about the fourth time glances to check we haven’t lost ours. Just in case the roof falls in. If it does, and buries us, we’ve got about an hour of breathable oxygen in these little bottles.

Fu-u-uck.

Weirdly, though, the main thing I feel is relief. The electric light, the glinting steel roadways running through the voids have chased away the ghosts. It’s nothing like I remember it in that long-ago dry summer. But the smell is the same, that sharp, damp, limey scent you can almost taste.

‘The miners use the vertical shaft because it’s the quickest way into the areas we need to stabilize,’ says Gary, as we start to walk through the metal-sided tunnel, boots skidding on the muddy ground. ‘But we bring the heavy plant in through the Stonefield entrance, a couple of streets away. A lot of the entrances to the workings are level access, adits into the hillside. They’re almost all blocked off now, and have been since the 1960s.’ He glances at me. ‘But I expect you know that.’

‘Don’t assume anything,’ I say. ‘This is nothing like my last job. Christ, look at some of these pillars. That one looks about as load-bearing as a Twiglet.’

‘This is one of the oldest parts of the mine,’ Dickon chips in. ‘Worked out in the early eighteenth century. Very typical, tapering shape to the pillars, partly because they’ve been robbed for stone over and over again by later generations, but also to support the roof. They’re made as wide as possible at the top, to form a series of near-arches. Keeps the ceiling up.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ I find myself saying, before I can stop myself.

‘Pardon?’ Dickon swivels his head sharply and for once looks at my face.

‘The old quarrymen might have thought that, but they would have been wrong. It’s true that an arch is more stable than a flat ceiling, but these pillars are far too widely spaced to form proper arches. That’s partly why there’s a problem.’

Dickon’s jaw drops, though I can’t think why. He must know that a mining engineer understands basic structures; and so should an archaeologist. The look he shoots me is distinctly poisonous. Well, I don’t like your dripping nose, sunshine. Or your wandering hands. I’m going to make damn sure you know you were out of order touching me. Perhaps he’s not used to being shown up by a woman because he strides off at a lick, shaking his head.

Gary raises an eyebrow at me, with an amused grin. ‘You’ve made a pal there.’

‘Sorry. Maybe I was a bit brusque. But he was explaining it like I was a schoolgirl. And wrong, too.’

‘This is the first underground job he’s had.’ Dickon has already disappeared round the corner into the next void; Gary dawdles and keeps his voice low. ‘We had a brilliant bloke before him, retired now, knew everything there was to know about mining and quarrying. Dickon comes at it from a different direction–his speciality is railways and tramlines, industrial transport. If we come across a set of wheel ruts or a metal rail, which we do quite often, he’s your man. As for the rest, he’s picking it up as he goes. He’s keen, I’ll give him that.’

The metal roadway is solid and comforting, insulating us from the vast uneasy darkness beyond. We could be astronauts, looking at the void from the safety of a space station. There are cables running above our heads, carrying power for the lighting, and the messages from Brendan’s hi-tech canaries. I can see why he’s so concerned with the ground-movement monitors: some of the pillars are badly faulted. It’s a relief when we follow the roadway round the corner into what is clearly a more recent section of the quarry; the pillars are broader and solid, and the voids are smaller chambers.

Dickon must be getting over his fit of pique because he’s waiting for us, pointing to a pillar with a dark, wedge-shaped shadow at its foot.

‘Wheelbarrow.’ His eyes slide back to my chest. ‘Abandoned here when the mine closed a hundred years ago. The wood eventually rotted away and left a black mark, exactly the shape of the barrow.’

The thought makes me shiver. Mine aren’t the only ghosts.

‘I still can’t hear anything,’ I say. ‘How far away are we from where they’re working?’

‘About three-quarters of a mile from the crew in the northern sector,’ says Gary. ‘And that’s as the crow flies. There’s another team building roads southwards. But it feels spooky, when you’ve spent your life in working mines and quarries. It’s so quiet. Where are my ear-protectors?’ He clamps his hands to his head in mock panic. ‘You must be used to this, though, if you’ve done a lot of work in old mines.’

I never get used to it. These places still fill me with awe and wonder. How did people–men–have the nerve to do this with no more than picks and candles to tunnel into these hidden places and risk flood, firedamp, being blown apart or buried alive? My feet slither and splash in creamy puddles. There’s water trickling down the walls in places, gleaming in the light.

‘Does anybody ever get lost?’ I ask.

‘Impossible,’ says Gary. ‘Nobody, but nobody, infringes the safety regulations. I make bloody sure of that. Everyone stays inside the roadways, even when we’re constructing a new one. You don’t f— muck around, this place is too dangerous. If Dickon here wants us to take a closer look at a particular feature, we build over to it. No short-cuts for anybody.’

The underground road takes another turn to the left, past a floor-to-ceiling dry-stone buttress built of the discards the quarrymen call gobs. I feel less tense now that I know we’re heading northwards. Every so often, another wood or metal tunnel branches off, leading to another part of the mine. We seem to have been walking for ages. The dampness of the air mists the light; bright as it is, it can’t penetrate far beyond the walkway.

Dickon starts a little whistle, an irritating tuneless hiss through his teeth, as another cathedral undercroft opens up around us, an uneven landscape piled with humps of discard stone. I glance nervously at Gary. Which of us is going to say something?

‘We’re under the main part of the village, where the shops are,’ says Gary. ‘Stop that, Dickon. The miners will go mad if they hear you. At least try to respect the superstitions. Especially here.’ He indicates a couple of the pillars, wearing white shrouds of reinforcing concrete. ‘We call this Co-op Cavern. Had a bit of a roof fall here a few months ago, nothing too serious, but it meant the poor old Co-op up above had to ask the deliverymen to park their lorries five hundred yards down the road and carry the stock in on foot until we got the pillars supported.’

‘How far’s the Co-op above our heads?’

‘About two metres, that’s all.’

‘Christ.’ How do people live with that kind of uncertainty?

‘Found anywhere to live yet?’ asks Gary.

‘Well, nowhere in Green Down,’ I say quickly. Both men laugh.

‘Trouble is, wherever you go in this area there are underground workings,’ says Dickon. I can tell he’s the sort who enjoys being the bearer of glad tidings. He blows his nose with a horrible liquid trumpeting sound. ‘Actually …’ sniff, sniff, it’s still dripping, would you believe, and he’s left a bogey on the end ‘… where you’re living, Gary, that’s got quarrying underneath. I was looking at an old survey map in the council archives last week.’

‘Well, thanks, Dick,’ says Gary. He’s striding on at a pace that suggests he’d like to leave Dickon behind. But you don’t get rid of him that easily.

‘Seriously, Gary, you should get a survey done or you might find your insurance is invalidated.’

‘It’ll be invalidated for bloody sure if I get a survey that proves I’m living on top of disaster.’

‘Sell it,’ I butt in. ‘Let some other bugger find out.’

Gary shoots me a hard look to check I’m joking.

Dickon takes me seriously. ‘That would be immoral.’

‘Listen,’ I say, as we round a corner into another set of pillared chambers, ‘sometimes it’s immoral to tell people things they don’t need to know.’

He’s still trying to work that one out when I hear muffled thuds and crashes. I look at Gary and raise my eyebrows.

‘That’s the works,’ he confirms.

We can see the occasional white flash of light ahead, at the end of a long chamber with pillars that taper like Superman’s torso. Beyond that the workings recede into darkness. I glance at the plan. We’re almost at the north-eastern extreme, under an area called Mare’s Hill.

The fizzing light of welding equipment reveals sharp fragments of activity, the creation of a new section of steel walkway. I can make out ten or so hard-hatted figures. Their high-visibility waistcoats turn them into bright silver scribbles against the darkness.

‘Most of this team are free miners from the Forest of Dean,’ says Gary. ‘Bit of rivalry between them and the Welsh miners on the other team, but they’re a great bunch. Tough as hell, good workers. It’s a hereditary thing, going back to the Middle Ages. They’re the only people allowed to dig the coal there, but I don’t think many can make a living from it now.’

I imagine them out there among the trees, dark, silent men with muscles like knotted rope, the sound of solitary picks echoing through mossy branches. Tock, tock, tock, like woodpeckers.

We’re almost at the end of the walkway now, and the miners have noticed us. One by one they put down their tools, and stand there, waiting, arms folded, in the last pool of electric light. Behind them the darkness is intense.

‘Hi, guys,’ says Gary. ‘Hi, Ted. Just showing the new engineer the workings.’

Ted, the one nearest me, is a big bloke with tattoos snaking up his corded arms. He pushes up the peak of his hard-hat to get a better look. His eyes are flinty, his mouth set like concrete.

Even Dickhead Dickon can tell something’s wrong. I can hear him shifting uneasily from foot to foot in the thunderous silence that’s fallen.

I guess no one thought to tell them that the new engineer is a woman.